Archetype
Open software for palaeography
Read the hands of the past.
Archetype turns observations about historical handwriting into evidence you can search, compare and cite, anchored to the manuscript image.
- Live corpus
- 710 charters, 3,000 page images and 12,700 annotated letter-forms from Models of Authority (Scotland, 1100–1250)
- Standards
- IIIF images, TEI texts, W3C Web Annotations
- Hosting
- Self-hosted, over your own manuscripts
- Status
- Public beta; open-source licence being chosen
What it does
Search a collection
By script, scribe, date, place or text, with facets, a timeline and a map.
Describe the hand
Mark each letter-form on the image and describe it in a shared vocabulary.
Link text to image
Tie the phrases of a TEI transcription to the places on the page they read.
Compare side by side
Set hands and letter-forms next to each other, and share the arrangement.
Run it yourself
Archetype is software, not one website. Any project can run it over its own manuscripts with Docker, and every part of the code is developed in the open on GitHub.
Where the project stands
Version 3 is a complete rewrite of the DigiPal framework, in development since 2024 and supported by the University of Glasgow's OG(H)AM project and the École Pratique des Hautes Études.